M.J. Rose

Logging ’caused Nazca collapse’ (BBC)
By Jody Bourton
Earth News reporter

Created by a sophisticated society that crossed the line?

The ancient Nazca people of Peru are famous for the lines they drew in the desert depicting strange animal forms.

A further mystery is what happened to this once great civilisation, which suddenly vanished 1,500 years ago.

Now a team of archaeologists have found the demise of the Nazca society was linked in part to the fate of a tree.

Analysing plant remains they reveal how the destruction of forests containing the huarango tree crossed a tipping point, causing ecological collapse.

For the rest from the BBC, click here.

Wouldn’t it be amazing to go back in time and observe the most ancient humans? If any of you have any past life memories of being alive before recorded history or even before the development of language, we would LOVE to hear your stories!

Scientists Rough Out Humanity´s 50,000-Year-Old Story (nytimes.com)

From what had seemed like irreversible oblivion, archaeologists and population geneticists believe they are on the verge of retrieving a record of human history stretching back almost 50,000 years.

The record, built on a synthesis of archaeological and genetic data, would be a bare bones kind of history without individual names or deeds. But it could create a chronicle of events, however sketchy, between the dawn of the human species at least 50,000 years ago and the beginning of recorded history in 3,500 B.C. The events would be the dated migrations of people from one region to another, linked with the archaeological cultures and perhaps with development of the world’s major language groups.

The new element in this synthesis is the increasing power of geneticists to look back in time and trace the history of past populations from analysis of the DNA of people alive today…

For the complete article, click here.

The authenticity of the shroud of Turin has been disputed for centuries – and it has confounded science for decades. It’s widely thought to be a fake from medieval times, but no one has been able to figure out how it would have been created. Until now apparently. I’ve often wondered when science would finally claim to have cracked this case…

ROME — An Italian scientist says he has reproduced the Shroud of Turin, a feat that he says proves definitively that the linen some Christians revere as Jesus Christ’s burial cloth is a medieval fake.
The shroud, measuring 14 feet, 4 inches by 3 feet, 7 inches bears the image, eerily reversed like a photographic negative, of a crucified man some believers say is Christ.
“We have shown that is possible to reproduce something which has the same characteristics as the Shroud,” Luigi Garlaschelli, who is due to illustrate the results at a conference on the para-normal this weekend in northern Italy, said on Monday…

For the complete article, click here.